Station graphical update

[Keeper]

I made some changes to the appearance of the stations -- four patterns for random colouring, darkened the metal a little bit, made all the outer paneling into solar panels, textured the grass and water, etc.

I don't know how to make .sgm files, so you'll have to remove your existing .sgm files in order for these to work. I'm sure someone out there can whip up the .sgm files to do this properly. Of course you're free to use or incorporate any of this.

This zip contains all the changed/new files: http://www.keeper1st.com/pioneer/station.zip

Some screenshots:







I wasn't sure if the randomly chosen pattern and colours would remain when you leave a system and return, but thankfully they do.

You wouldn't believe how long it took to get that diamond pattern to work right...!

[nozmajner]

Lookin' good!
The only thing I'd change is that the hub shouldn't have solar panels in my opinion. But that would mean another, panel-less texture file.

sgms are generated during build, so you don't need to do anything about them if you decide to submit this as a PR. They still need to be deleted if you just overwrite the game data. Speaking of which, if you pack your zip up like the structure of the data directory, in this case putting these files into a models/stations/orbital/ and zip the whole thing up, then you can put it in the mods directory and the game loads it as a mod. (sgm deletition would still apply, you'd need to build the sgms with the model compiler and include them in the mod too).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that you worked from the dds textures. You can find the source files in the pioneer-assets repository.

Edit: I moved the thread into the 3D subforum.

[Keeper]

The hub gets sunlight too, so... A nice explanation would be that the panels at the hub power the docking port area while those on the outside power the rest.

Yeah, I had used the DDS files for lack of anything else, so there's a bit of artifacts but not too terrible. I saved the pattern files as PNG as they ended up actually smaller that way and didn't corrupt the the colour data. I'll have to save that repository and have a look; maybe I can clean my modified DDS files of older artifacts a bit.

I've begun making a few additional paint schemes for ships that currently don't have any variations, too. (Also brightening up the Pumpkinseed a bit; it's still darker than other ships after my edit, but not by as much.) For that matter, I edited the old Wave Explorer mod to get it working in the current JSON version of the game (I had to make a guess as to the price in the new scheme of things), if anyone is interested.

I don't know the first thing about compiling the models, so I may have to leave that up to someone else unless there's an up-to-date tutorial somewhere. I do know about the mods directory; I edited the font sizes as a mod for my own installation last February. Smaller text for less scrolling! (I have a big enough monitor...)

[FluffyFreak]

Just a quick note from me to say: yes, interested in all those mods :)

[Keeper]

Here's what I've got so far (perhaps this should be another thread).

The now-working Wave Explorer: http://www.keeper1st.com/pioneer/wave_e_json.zip (sorry; I did not have the original readme or credits files anymore). I modified the patterns to create a border around the "Explorer" logo so it isn't lost in the busy paint schemes. All textures are still .png files. If you convert to DDS you'll want to change the overall brightness/contrast first as the original designer had used a gray scale with a value exactly at the switching point (i.e. 127 127 127) which gets corrupted by the DDS compression into 127 128 127, missing up the colours completely. He also for some reason had shades not bright enough to reach the switching point from no-colour to colour 1 (e.g. something like 27 27 27), so an overall change to the image's contrast/brightness levels to get all the shades he used working, and get them well within their boundaries so DDS compression won't break them, probably is in order.

What textures I've made or modified for existing ships (note that some ships did not have the use_patterns flag activated so you'll need to delete the .sgm file of any ship for which you see an included .model file here): http://www.keeper1st.com/pioneer/newtexes.zip

As well as new patterns, some existing textures were modified. For example, besides brightening the pumpkinseed texture, I modified the DSMiner to desaturate the "rusty" parts because it seems odd that a ship spending so much time outside of an atmosphere would rust, and made a slight change to the "worn" version of another ship's texture, choosing not to have its cargo bay doors painted, for a little more variety than simply "worn" or "not worn".

[FluffyFreak]

Just so you know, the only thing keeping us from merging the PR of this are the problems pointed out by nozmajner about the artifacts caused by using the DDS files from the original.

I'm not sure if you want to discuss changes with noz, or idea etc but that's all we're holding off on :)

[Keeper]

I'll have to figure out how those original files are put together. (I use Photoshop; these I guess are gimp files, with separate layers saved as individual files.)

[nozmajner]

They are inkscape and Krita files. You should be able to export a psd from Krita, if I remember correcty, I didn't use any krita specific thing that won't export properly.

[Keeper]

In the mean time, a little love to the ground_station -- one entirely new pattern, and one to replace the "nothing" pattern (leaving the buildings unpainted, but making the numbers a random colour, with a border so even if the random colour is close to the pad colour, there's still enough contrast to see the outline). An possible alternative to the darker border is simply to shrink the colour zone of the numbers, thereby making the original light grey be a border around the random colour. Whichever you think would be best, I can do... Maybe some combinations of these, for example no painted roof but the painted walkway plus painted numbers...




Texture files are here: http://www.keeper1st.com/pioneer/gstationpats.zip

[nozmajner]

Lookin' good.

Odd, on my phone, your images are shown, but not on my desktop.